“I AM GOING TO ASSIST IN BUILDING
A PLANE TO BOMB HITLER”
World War II was an emergency on an epic scale. Although American women weren’t shelled and driven from their homes as some were during the Civil War, the country needed their participation more desperately, and in more different ways, than it ever had before. If housewives had paid strict attention to the barrage of demands and warnings from government propaganda machines, they probably would have gone mad with anxiety. They were told that it was their duty to take over for the men who had gone to the front, filling in as bus drivers, bank tellers, and defense workers in the aircraft and munitions factories. They had to support food rationing by shunning the black market, buying only the amounts of meat, sugar, and butter their ration cards allowed. But their meals had to be healthy and tasty—otherwise they and their family might succumb to “hidden hunger” and slow down war production at work, thus endangering the soldiers in combat.
Women who failed to volunteer for a factory job were dogged by pictures of idle equipment that warned a “soldier may die unless you man this machine.” If they did go to work, every moment counted. One of the many propaganda films slipped in between the movie features was called Conquer the Clock, and it showed a soldier being killed because a female defense worker slipped off for a cigarette, allowing some cartridges to go through the assembly line uninspected. Constance Bowman, a worker assigned to install safety belts at an aircraft factory, was told that if she took a day off, the planes might roll off the assembly line without seat belts, endangering fliers’ lives. Copywriters for public service ads came up with so many scenarios for how civilian women could wreak havoc on the casualty rates that an official at the Office of War Information warned his subordinates: “threatening women with the death of a soldier is poor psychology with which to attempt to drive them into the labor market.”
Married women, who formed the main target of the propaganda barrage, were supposed to volunteer for defense jobs, save pan drippings and turn them in to the nearest butcher, contribute to metal scrap drives, grow victory gardens and can the harvest, and above all, continue to nurture the family and keep the home fires burning. Those who worked—and wrestled with the painful bus commutes made necessary by gasoline rationing—were still supposed to respect rationing regulations even though they had virtually no time to shop. (In the movie Tender Comrades, five soldiers’ wives have a spirited argument about what to do when the butcher sends them more meat than their ration stamps permit. The star, Ginger Rogers, takes the position that accepting the bacon could endanger the lives of their husbands overseas.) The government and the media uncovered a host of role models, like Mrs. Chris Laukhug in Defiance County, Ohio, who canned 2,000 quarts of forty different kinds of food, dried bushels of fruit and vegetables, and made her own maple syrup. In Atlanta, Helen Dortch Longstreet, eighty, became a star when she was discovered working in an aircraft plant. Mrs. Longstreet, the widow of a Confederate general (it had been a May-December romance) assured her interviewers, “I am going to assist in building a plane to bomb Hitler…to the judgment seat of God.”
“A WOMAN’S ARMY…
THINK OF THE HUMILIATION”
In 1940, Jeanette Rankin, the Montana Republican who had been the first woman ever elected to Congress in 1916, resumed the career that had been derailed when she voted against World War I. Rankin was elected to her old House seat, once again on a pacifist platform. “By voting for me…you can express your opposition to sending your sons to foreign lands to fight in a foreign war,” she told her audiences. At the time, most Americans shared her antiwar sentiments, but after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, national opinion changed overnight. Congresswoman Rankin rushed back to Washington, “driving to my execution,” as she remembered it. On December 8, the House voted 388–1 to declare war on Japan. Again, she had been elected just in time to vote against a world war. Police had to escort Rankin back to her office through the angry crowd. “Montana is 100 percent against you,” her brother cabled from home. William Allen White, the legendary editor of the Emporia Gazette in Kansas, editorialized that his paper “entirely disagrees with the wisdom of her position” then added: “But Lord, it was a brave thing.” At the end of her term, she would retire, consistent and unrepentant.
Rankin was not the only American woman with limited enthusiasm for armed combat. Two months after Pearl Harbor, a survey found that 57 percent of the male respondents favored war with Japan “even if our cities would be bombed” while only 36 percent of the women were willing to go that far. Still, it was becoming clear that the nation was going to require women not only to support the war effort, but also to join the military itself. The army needed them to do clerical work and other noncombatant jobs, to free up more men for fighting. But most of the top brass was adamant that the women should only be there temporarily and should not receive full military status.
The generals marched headlong into Representative Edith Nourse Rogers, a Massachusetts Republican, who was equally determined that women would get the same rights and protections as other members of the service. Rogers had gotten to Congress by the traditional route, succeeding her husband when he died in office. But unlike most House widows, Rogers won reelection in her own right. (She died in 1960 at the age of seventy-nine, campaigning for her seventeenth term.) She had gone overseas as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I, and she remembered how badly the military had treated the American women who did its clerical and communications work in Europe. Refused military commissions, they “received no compensation of any kind in the event they were sick or injured—and many were,” Rogers told her colleagues. After a series of compromises, she managed to pass legislation establishing the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). Most of the other military services had smaller women’s units. More than 350,000 women wound up enlisting during the war, mainly in the WAC and the nursing corps.
The army still went out of its way to stress that it hoped the WACs’ role would last no longer than the hostilities. For a while, the War Department adopted the slogan “The WAC who shares your army life will make a better postwar wife.” Officials also stressed how mundane the women’s role would be. Assistant Chief of Staff John Hildring echoed a familiar sentiment when he said that “we have found difficulty in getting enlisted men to perform tedious duties anywhere nearly as well as women will do it.”
The attention given to women far outweighed their numbers; they were never more than 2 percent of the armed forces. But while they were celebrated in endless newsreels and magazine photos, they were also denigrated. Frieda Schurch, a WAC assigned to Drew Field in Tampa, remembered that the regular army folk did not feel it was appropriate to have women on base “so they put us five miles out, off the base, in a swamp that wasn’t drained and had mosquitoes.” Although Drew Field had only about 100 WACs, she said, “We always averaged 14 in the hospital for infected mosquito bites.” The area was drained only after the women were evacuated and the barracks became housing for prisoners of war.
From the beginning there were rumors that the women were sexually promiscuous, that the WACs in particular were a sort of geisha corps recruited to improve the “morale” of the troops in the most basic way possible. There was a widely reported rumor that thousands of pregnant WACs had been evacuated from North Africa, a story that turned out to have grown out of the evacuation of three women, one who was ill and two others who were married and pregnant. “It raised hell,” wrote one company commander. “Long-distance calls from parents began to come in, telling the girls to come home. The girls all came in crying, asking if this disgrace was what they had been asked to join the Army for…. It took all the pride and enthusiasm for the Army right out of them.” The FBI was called in to determine if this was some sort of enemy disinformation campaign and found that most of the talk originated with male servicemen.
The idea that American men were fighting to protect the women back home was extremely powerful during the war, and many servicemen felt diminished by having women in the military. True, women were restricted to noncombatant duty, but most of the men never saw combat, either. The only thing that identified them as defenders of the homeland was their uniform, and now women wanted to wear that, too. “A woman’s Army to defend the United States of America! Think of the humiliation. What has become of the manhood of America that we have to call on our women to do the duty of men?” asked a congressman from New York during the debate over Representative Rogers’s bill. Black male soldiers, who had plenty of other assaults on their dignity, were unhappy about the arrival of black women. “The efforts of the women to be supportive of the men was mistaken for competition and patronage,” said one African American WAC. Even the idea that women were simply stepping in to free up men for the front lines drew a decidedly mixed reaction, depending on how enthusiastic the soldiers were about getting the chance to risk their lives for their country. A WAC in Birmingham ran into the man whose job processing payrolls she had taken and was told: “Thanks for letting me go.” But Evelyn Fraser, a former Indiana reporter who volunteered for the military, said that a lieutenant she had been sent to replace refused to explain how to do the job, for fear that once she learned, he’d be sent overseas.
“THREE HOLES IN THE TAIL, BOYS,
THAT’S A LITTLE TOO CLOSE”
The first five WACs flown to Europe had been trained to serve as executive secretaries. They arrived in England and were promptly put on a boat for North Africa, which was sunk. Although all five were rescued, Oveta Culp Hobby, the Texas newspaper publisher who had been appointed head of the WACs, flew to the training center at Daytona Beach to warn the women about the dangers of going into a combat theater. After her speech, the WACs were given a break to eat and were urged to think about whether they still wanted to volunteer for duty overseas. “We didn’t go to dinner, we all got in line to sign up,” one woman wrote. “The whole battalion, one behind the other…. The officers were walking around with tears running down their cheeks, especially Colonel Hobby.” Of the 300 women at Daytona Beach, 298 volunteered.
Not all the overseas assignments worked out well. More than 5,000 women wound up in the Southwest Pacific, mainly performing post office duties, like sorting and censoring the soldiers’ mail to make sure it didn’t reveal military secrets. They went through endless piles of letters from young men to their friends and lovers, much of it obscene. They worked ten hours a day seven days a week, and since no one was willing to give them special permission not to wear their uniforms, their heavy clothing was constantly wet with sweat and gave them skin diseases. The only alternative was light cotton shirts that left them vulnerable to mosquitoes and malaria. Some of the officers were so worried about the women’s safety that they kept them virtual prisoners and after a year or more of close confinement, WACs in New Guinea were reported to be guilty of “resentment, disobedience and immature conduct.” Other women, who landed after the troops in Italy, North Africa, and Normandy, got better treatment and more meaningful work.
The theory that women should only be asked to do work that was safe and relatively mundane was ignored whenever something risky or difficult actually needed to be done. The Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) was created to free male fliers for service overseas. The 1,000 women who were accepted flew 60 million miles during the war, in every type of plane manufactured by the military, including experimental jets and the B-29 Superfortress. Male pilots, who often felt they should not have to risk their lives on domestic flights far from the glory of combat, cheerfully turned over dangerous assignments to the women. Originally, the WASPs were supposed to simply fly new planes from the factories to the ports, but they also wound up towing targets so the artillery could practice, flying past long lines of guns being fired by inexperienced trainees. Sometimes when the WASPs returned, their planes were riddled with the bullets that were supposed to be directed at the targets they were towing. The male pilots at Camp Irwin in California refused to tow targets for tank gunners, who tended to fire wildly as they raced their cumbersome vehicles across the desert while attempting to aim and shoot. The next time the tanks were taken out for a drill, they heard a female voice over the radio calmly saying: “Three holes in the tail, boys, that’s a little too close.” The male pilots also were happy to hand over the job of testing planes that had been grounded for safety reasons and had theoretically been repaired.
Early on, the women pilots had to fight against military attempts to ground them when they had their periods. An army flight surgeon, Nels Monsrud, conducted a rigorous study of the women’s performance and produced scientific evidence that menstruation had no effect on their capacity to perform as pilots, putting an end to a legend that had bedeviled women fliers since the days of the Wright brothers. (It wasn’t the only theory about female biology circulating in the corridors of power. Men in both the military and Congress still believed that as women approached menopause they lost their reason, and the Surgeon General was called in to beat back an attempt to require women with military commissions to retire before their fortieth birthday. )
Although the WASPs’ safety record was better than that of men doing comparable jobs, thirty-eight of them were killed in service. (One of them was crushed when her plane crashed after someone put sugar in the gas tank.) When a WASP died in the line of duty, her friends raised money to send the body home, because their corps was never given official military status. The dead flier was not even eligible to have an American flag placed over her coffin, although the women who accompanied the bodies of their comrades home never had the heart to tell the families that their daughters and sisters could not have that military honor. The WASPs believed that eventually they would get their commissions, but as the war went on, the military developed a surplus of pilots, and male fliers stationed at domestic bases were suddenly faced with the possibility that they might be transferred into the infantry. Jill McCormick, a WASP who once survived a midair explosion of a battered dive bomber she was ferrying to a reclamation center, was sitting in a Raleigh hotel lobby when she was surrounded by men in uniform, calling her a slut and shouting at her to go back home. Under pressure from the male pilots, Congress rejected a bill to militarize the WASPs, and future training classes were canceled. The program was deactivated at the end of 1944, and the women were unceremoniously sent home.
“LITTLE DID I DREAM THAT WE WOULD BE
ALWAYS HUNGRY, ALWAYS FRIGHTENED”
No one questioned what the more than 70,000 women who served in the army and navy nurse corps were doing in the military, although female doctors had to fight tooth and nail to get commissions, just as they had in World War I. (The secretary of war’s niece, who was a physician, wound up enlisting in the British medical forces out of frustration.) Toward the end of the war, Congress was actually preparing to draft registered nurses because the need was so great, but hostilities ceased before the plan was put into operation. However, the nurses also suffered from a torrent of rumors that they were promiscuous. There was a mean streak in the national character that presumed women who willingly went to live among thousands of soldiers could be after only one thing. In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, one nurse in training explained that few of her classmates were enlisting because they feared their reputations would be ruined. “Everywhere one turns—on trains, streetcars, at social gatherings or the USO—men of our armed forces debase the very organization that protects and heals them in their afflictions,” she complained.
Although nurses worked near the lines of battle in North Africa and Italy, and six were killed after the landing at Anzio, they were generally kept well away from the front. Corpsmen attempted to stabilize the wounded on the battlefield and removed them to hospitals in the rear. That policy was inspired, at least in part, by a disaster during the first moments of the war, when nearly 100 army and navy nurses were caught in the Japanese assault on the Philippines; most spent years as prisoners of war. They were not women who had gone to the East for combat duty. Before the war, a posting in Manila was one of the military’s cushiest assignments, a world of houseboys and maids, palm groves and orchids, tennis courts and weekly polo matches. “We lived high on the hog,” said Minnie Stubbs, one of the nurses.
In the disarray following Pearl Harbor, the army and navy could not hold the Philippines, nor could they rescue their personnel. The Americans decided to retreat to the Bataan peninsula, from which they hoped eventually to be evacuated. The nurses served for months in makeshift hospitals set up in the jungles of Bataan, under constant Japanese bombardment and fear of imminent attack. “Little did I dream that we would be always hungry, always frightened,” said one of the nurses later. As Japanese warships shelled American positions, nurse Sally Blaine looked around her and saw patients lying on the jungle floor as far as the eye could see. “I can remember doing dressings, starting right after breakfast and continuing throughout the day,” said Hattie Brantley. After a while, she found that her back would not straighten up between patients, “and I’d get down on my knees, finally not even bothering to arise but crawling to the next cot.” The officers noticed how uncomplaining the nurses were. “I was continually amazed that anyone living and working under such primitive conditions could remain as calm, pleasant, efficient and impeccably neat and clean as those remarkable nurses,” wrote a military surgeon after the war.
A small number of the nurses were evacuated, and when they arrived back home, they found themselves feted in a peculiar, distancing way. They were either portrayed as superheroes, who drove through enemy fire to deliver vitamins to men on the front, or as fluffy little things intent on keeping their noses powdered. Brunetta Kuehlthau, a physical therapist, managed to send a letter to her family through the blockade at Bataan. She assured them she was “comparatively safe” and mentioned some homey details that she thought would not disturb her mother. The New York Times reported on the letter under the headline “Nurse on Corregidor Finds It ‘Not Too Bad’: Letter Says Hairpin Shortage Causes Women to Cut Hair.” Hollywood cranked out a string of movies about the Bataan nurses. In the most famous, So Proudly We Hail, Veronica Lake sacrifices herself to save her fellow nurses from a group of rapacious Japanese soldiers by detonating a grenade she had hidden in her breasts.
Thinking of the Bataan nurses as action heroes with thermometers or as coeds on a bad vacation concealed the grim reality of what was actually going on. The soldiers who the nurses tended to in Bataan wound up being driven on a death march during which Japanese guards shot anyone who fell by the wayside from exhaustion and disease. Most of the nurses were taken as prisoners of war and held with 3,000 American and British civilians captured in Manila. They were even kept from taking care of the American soldiers, who were interned separately. When they emerged from their camp three years later—miraculously all alive, although many of their fellow prisoners had died of malnutrition or tropical diseases—the stories about them almost always focused on things like their eagerness to buy cosmetics and investigate the newest hairstyles. Unlike male prisoners of war, they were not treated for the psychological effects of their ordeal—the doctors seemed to assume that the women’s clinical training made them invulnerable to posttraumatic stress.
Physicians who had served with Maude Davidson, the crusty head of nurses in the internment camp, urged that she be awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. General Jonathan Wainwright, who had commanded the troops on Bataan, rejected the idea, arguing that her position was not high enough to merit the army’s third-highest award. During the fall of Bataan, Wainwright had told the American people that the nurses’ names “must always be hallowed when we speak of American heroes,” but after years of grueling imprisonment himself, he had apparently raised the bar on heroism. To add insult to injury, the major general in charge of the awards board concluded that although Davidson must have had to take some independent actions in keeping her nurses together and working through the evacuation, bombardment, and years of internment, “a large share” of the initiative and responsibility “must have been carried by doctors and commanders.”
“SHE’S MAKING HISTORY, WORKING FOR VICTORY”
Meanwhile, back at home, more than 13 million people had left for the service, and the same women who had been told to stay out of the job market during the Depression were now being begged to go to work. About 6 million women did take jobs during the war, joining the 14 million who had already been working and doing everything from paving roads to operating cranes. By the time fighting ended in 1945, women made up more than a third of the national workforce. Although most of them held clerical, sales, and other pink-collar jobs, the idealized female employee of the 1940s was Rosie the Riveter, a mythic creature celebrated by Norman Rockwell on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post with a famous portrait that showed her perched on a steel beam, munching a sandwich and displaying her muscles while she casually ground Nazi propaganda under her heel.
“While other girls attend a favorite cocktail bar,” went a song of the hour…
Sipping dry martinis, munching caviar;
There’s a girl who’s really putting them to shame—
Rosie is her name.
All day long, whether rain or shine
She’s part of the assembly line,
She’s making history, working for victory,
Rosie, Rosie, Rosie, Rosie, Rosie, Rosie the Riveter.
The number of women actually munching caviar during the war was hardly extensive, but still, for the first time the country was singing the praises of women who did hard labor. Women’s magazines, with a great deal of prodding from the federal government, applauded women who held down jobs in the same way they had always celebrated women who stayed home. Ladies’ Home Journal ran a story about a female surgeon who called off her engagement when she discovered her fiancé expected her to quit working. On the radio, Stella Dallas and other soap opera heroines signed up for defense jobs. (It was only one of the contributions soap opera heroines made to the war effort. Several lost fictional sons or husbands in combat, and Helen Trent fell over a cliff while trying to save a truckload of war supplies.) In many ways, this was an old story. In the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, women had taken over their husbands’ farm duties, and plowing a field was certainly as tough a job as slinging rivets. The difference in World War II—as it had been in World War I on a smaller scale—was that a huge number of women had to be recruited to do jobs that were not part of the family business.
The first women to volunteer for defense jobs had already been working, in low-status, low-paying positions, and they grabbed at the chance to make better salaries. Peggy Terry, who got a job with her mother and sister at a shell-loading plant in Kentucky, was euphoric. “We made the fabulous sum of thirty-two dollars a week,” she said. “To us it was just an absolute miracle. Before that, we made nothing.” Even when the chemicals they were handling turned the women’s faces and hair orange, Terry said, they weren’t fazed: “The only thing we worried about was other women thinking we had dyed our hair.” As a result of the great migration of women to defense jobs, 600 laundries went out of business in 1942, and in Detroit, a third of the restaurants closed because of the lack of help.
Although most unmarried women were already working when the war started, a number of college students quit school to join the war effort. Among the other early volunteers were the wives of servicemen. “Darlin, You are now the husband of a career woman—just call me your Ship Yard Babe!” wrote Polly Crow to her husband overseas. Rose Kaminski of Milwaukee, whose husband served in the navy, left her young daughter with an elderly neighbor when she learned that crane operators were needed at an ordnance plant to move the huge howitzer gun barrels. “Well I was running one in three days,” she recalled much later. “It just came to me; I loved it.” At her old job at a machine shop, she said dismissively, she had handled “piddly little pieces” of the guns, whose function she never understood. “This seemed like part of it. You were doing something.”
The shortage of teachers impelled most school boards to drop their rules against married women, and some actually appealed to married ex-teachers to return. The Office of War Information suggested articles it would like to see in print to newspapers and magazines, urging, among other things, “stories showing the advent of women in logging camps, on the railroads, riding the ranges, and showing them not as weak sisters but coming through in manly style.” For a few women on the home front, the war opened up opportunities that might otherwise have been unimaginable. People began dancing to all-girl bands. The owner of the Chicago Cubs started an All-American Girls League, which required its players to wear uniforms that featured short skirts and satin briefs—a combination that led to endless bruises for women who had to slide into bases barelegged.
By late 1942, unemployment was virtually nonexistent, and the government projected a need for 3 million more workers in the next year. Child labor laws were suspended for youngsters over twelve. Handicapped Americans were given opportunities to enter the workplace, as were black women and older women. But the prime pool of potential workers was married women. Ads and movie newsreels constantly emphasized how defense work was just like housework: “instead of cutting the lines of a dress, this woman cuts a pattern of aircraft parts…a lathe holds no more terror than a sewing machine…after a short apprenticeship, this woman can operate a drill press just as easily as a juice extractor.” However, even when the war was at its height and the need for workers was most desperate, nearly 90 percent of the housewives who had been at home when Pearl Harbor was bombed still ignored the call.
One of the reasons undoubtedly was the lack of child care. Unlike England, where the government provided all sorts of support services for women who worked, the U.S. government left them to their own devices. Congress didn’t appropriate money for federal day care centers until 1943, and even then it was used so ineptly that only about 10 percent of the defense workers’ children were ever enrolled. And while married women were being criticized as unpatriotic for failing to work, they were being denounced as bad mothers if they did. Agnes Meyer, the wife of the publisher of the Washington Post, published a report on latchkey children that was quoted everywhere: “In Los Angeles a social worker counted 45 infants locked in cars at a single parking lot while their mothers were at work in war plants,” she wrote. “Older children in many cities sit in the movies, seeing the same film over and over again until mother comes off the evening ‘swing’ shift and picks them up. Some children of working parents are locked in their homes, others locked out.”
But there were other less tangible reasons for the unenthusiastic response to recruitment campaigns. Defense work, although more rewarding than waiting tables, was not all that pleasant. In 1943, two San Diego high school teachers, Constance Bowman and Clara Marie Allen, wrote about their experiences during the summer, when they volunteered for the swing shift at a factory that built the B-24 bombers. At the end of the first shift, Bowman wrote, “I was tireder than I have ever been in my life and also dirtier. My hair was tinseled with tiny shavings of metal, my hands were grimy, and my fingernails were bordered in black…. My uniform, my bright blue uniform of yesterday afternoon, had a tear in the knee, a streak of grease across the blouse and a large dusty circle on the seat of the pants where I had sat on the floor.” Being forced to wear pants to work instead of skirts made Bowman and Allen feel that they had lost their position in the universe. Men no longer offered them seats on the crowded buses; they were snubbed by clerks and ticket agents and leered at by strange males on the street. “It was a great shock to C.M. and me to find that being a lady depended more upon our clothes than upon ourselves,” Bowman wrote. (Though women wore slacks for athletics, they were not yet common for street wear. When four WASPs were grounded by weather in Americus, Georgia, in 1944, they were arrested by local police for violating a rule against women wearing slacks on the street at night.)
Throughout American history, the concept of the woman as a protected homebody went hand in hand with the reality that most women—poor women—were expected to work and were not given any special deference because of their sex. By going off to sling rivets or weld airplane wings, middle-class women lost their status and joined the other part of American womanhood that was expected to fend for itself. “Whether they are dust-bowl mothers buying butter and eggs for the first time, or former dime store clerks making more money than army majors, or war wives who feel they must keep them flying because their husbands are flying them, or school teachers putting in a summer vacation on a war job,” Bowman concluded, the defense factory workers had all been leveled: “they are women who wear slacks instead of skirts.”
“VARIETY MEATS: THEY ARE GOOD,
ABUNDANT, HIGHLY NUTRITIOUS”
Whether women worked or not, their lives were made infinitely more complicated by rationing, which restricted the availability of sugar, coffee, butter, certain types of meat, and canned goods as well as things like gasoline, tires, and stockings. New appliances were not being manufactured, and children who were promised a bicycle on the eve of World War II were sometimes licensed to drive by the time it became available. Unable to find stockings, women began wearing leg makeup instead. And since the stockings of the 1940s had seams down the back, women’s magazines ran guides on how to draw a realistic-looking line down the calf.
American rationing was mainly a matter of inconvenience. By eating less sugar and being forced to walk because of the gasoline shortage, the population was arguably in better shape than it would ever be in again. “Never in the long history of human combat have so many talked so much about sacrifice with so little deprivation as in the United States in World War II,” sniped John Kenneth Galbraith, who worked at the Office of Price Administration. But for the American middle class, long accustomed to prime cuts of beef for dinner, the appearance of government-issued recipes for “Tongue Rolls Florentine” or “Tripe à la Maryland” was traumatizing. A government-issued magazine article entitled “Variety Meats: They are Good, Abundant, Highly Nutritious” explained in the most irritating manner possible that the army did not serve things like kidneys, livers, or tripe “because they spoil easily, take time to prepare and the men don’t like them. These objections, valid for the Army, make no sense when cited by civilians.”
Civilians got stamps every month that gave them the right to buy different products. “My mother and all the neighbors would get together around the dining-room table, and they’d be changing a sugar coupon for a bread or a meat coupon. It was like a giant Monopoly game,” said Sheril Cunning, who was a child in Long Beach, California, during the war. The Office of Price Administration raised or lowered point values to encourage people to consume things that were in oversupply, notably eggs. At times, the government’s enthusiasm for getting women to buy more eggs was so intense it seemed as if Hitler could be stopped only if everyone ate an omelet a day. Some housewives noted bitterly that if they were given a larger allotment of sugar for baking, they could find plenty of ways to get rid of the eggs that were currently causing rebellion at the dinner table. “Give us housewives more sugar and watch the eggs disappear,” wrote Mrs. George Coffey of Montana. “People can only eat so many cooked eggs or they will become nauseated of them….” Commercial bakeries got a much more generous sugar allotment than individual citizens, encouraging the trend away from home-baked goods.
All the wartime propaganda about nutrition gave Americans far more knowledge about the food they ate. Despite the diet-conscious 1920s, most people still did not know the difference between a vitamin and a calorie. It was in World War II that housewives were introduced to the food pyramid and the “basic seven” kinds of food necessary for a healthy diet. It was a fat-friendly listing that gave butter a category all to itself.
“WE WOULD GO TO DANCES
AND GIRLS WOULD DANCE WITH GIRLS”
Even as women were being urged to the factories, they were being warned to remember that this was just for the emergency, and not to get carried away. A Seattle paper told them to avoid going “berserk over the new opportunities for masculine clothing and mannish actions.” A Des Moines Register cartoon showed a giantess of a woman in overalls, her pocket stuffed with “her own man’s size pay envelope” marching off with her toolbox while a tiny husband in apron and broom calls out: “But remember you gotta come back as soon as the war is over!”
“Oh yeah?” sneers the hulking female war worker.
The war actually did a great deal to restore men’s Depression-battered position as the most important member of the family. The nation’s entire attention was turned to the fate of husbands, brothers, sons, and boyfriends fighting overseas. Meanwhile, the men who remained back home were a rare and valuable commodity—perhaps a little bit like those southern women of the seventeenth century. Dorothy Zmuda of Milwaukee remembered one male coworker in her office who never did his share of work. When she discovered he was making more money than she was, her boss told her: “This is this time of our life that men earn more than women. They are considered more important, and even if you do the same thing he does and even if he doesn’t even do it, he gets more money than you do and this is our world today.”
Marriage rates jumped. “The pressure to marry a soldier was so great that after a while I didn’t question it,” said Dellie Hahne of Los Angeles, who wound up unhappily wed to a man in uniform. “That women married soldiers and sent them overseas happy was hammered at us.” Single Americans yearned for someone who was waiting for them, or for whom they were waiting. Dorothy Zmuda was casually dating a young man who suddenly offered her a ring when he was drafted. When she told him no, he found another girl who accepted it a couple of weeks later. “The girls that I knew all had boyfriends who were in the service and we didn’t date because we were ‘tagged’” said Emily Koplin of Milwaukee. “We didn’t do any dating—those were the years where we would go to dances and girls would dance with girls.” The Baltimore Sun noticed that “Women who never ventured out at night without a man sally forth in twos and threes without a qualm. Late movies have a large female audience.”
The forties was a time when women rediscovered the community of other women. “It was very important to have somebody to lean on, to have somebody to talk to,” said Koplin, who felt that parents “were worried about their sons being overseas, not necessarily the daughter that was left back home.” That sense of female solidarity was probably strongest among the women whose husbands were away in the service. Jean Lechnir was pregnant with her third child in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, when her husband was drafted. She banded together with nine other women in the neighborhood whose husbands were away at war. They pooled their ration stamps and played cards for a pound of butter or bag of sugar, and once a month, when the serviceman’s pay came in, they left their children with relatives and went out to eat. “Maybe a top meal was $2.50…and maybe we could have a cocktail or glass of pop or something for another twenty-five or fifty cents. That was our evening. But we’d extend it long enough to sit and watch other people dance or just sit and reminisce and compare notes of the letters we got from our husbands.” The friendships she formed in that group, Lechnir said, extended on for the next half century.
“WELL, OF COURSE, SO WERE THE JAPANESE”
World War II had a way of cracking open America’s tight-knit immigrant communities. While the sons were serving in the military with people from all parts of the country, the daughters, who might normally have dropped out of school to get married, stayed on to graduate and went to work in factories where they made friends with people from different backgrounds. Anne Dinsmore, the daughter of Sicilian immigrants, stayed in the Italian community in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband’s family while he was in service. When the sons went off to war, she noted, “their fathers fell apart…Just fell apart. And it was the women who stood very strong and kept the families together.” Dinsmore remembered the Italian women worried that the country would turn on them when Italy allied with Germany and became an enemy nation. “And I kept saying ‘No, that can’t be. You see, your sons, our brothers, are fighting in this war,’” said Dinsmore. “Well, of course, so were the Japanese.”
The Japanese were different. Earl Warren, the future Supreme Court Chief Justice, was attorney general in California when 110,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and taken to live behind barbed wire for the duration of the war. He assured the nation that Italian Americans and German Americans did not need the same treatment. “We believe that when we are dealing with the Caucasian race…we can…arrive at some fairly sound conclusions because of our knowledge of the way they live in the community,” he said. After all, Dwight Eisenhower, who was leading the Allied forces, was of German descent, and some of the most popular American celebrities, like Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, were Italian. But most Americans had never met someone of Japanese origin.
When the Japanese Americans were interned, they were allowed to bring with them only what they could carry. Many of the men had been taken away first, because they were suspected of being enemy agents. “These poor women whose husbands were rounded up by the FBI, they were all fairly young and they had small children and no one to help them and they had to somehow make ready to leave…in forty-eight hours,” said Fred Fujikawa. “This was in December so a lot of the families had already brought their Christmas presents, like new phonographs or radios, refrigerators…. These guys wouldcome in and offer ten or fifteen dollars and because they had to leave, they’d sell.” Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old when her father was taken off by FBI agents and her mother was forced to move the family to a camp. When a dealer offered her $15 for the family’s heirloom china “blue and white porcelain, almost translucent,” her mother lost control and began breaking the plates, sending the dealer racing for the door. “When he was gone she stood there smashing cups and bowls and platters until the whole set lay in scattered blue and white fragments across the wooden floor,” her daughter remembered.
Yoshiko Uchida and her sister and parents were sent to a center in California where they were quartered in a stable, each family assigned to one horse stall. “The stall was about ten by twenty feet and empty except for three folded Army cots lying on the floor,” she wrote later. “Our stable consisted of twenty-five stalls facing north which were back to back with an equal number facing south, so we were surrounded on three sides.” Neighbors not only could hear a family’s conversations, they knocked on the wall to ask that someone repeat a comment they failed to catch. The latrines in most of the camps were a line of open toilets and many of the older women were humiliated at the lack of privacy. Some held newspapers over their faces. Others dragged large cardboard cartons to the latrine, and set them around the toilets like a screen.
Once the internees were relocated to permanent camps, the Japanese Americans created lives as best they could. The Department of the Interior boasted that the camp residents, who included some of the West’s most successful produce farming families, “are now producing practically all the vegetables needed by the 90,000 people residing at the centers.” Meanwhile, 33,000 young Japanese American men were serving in the army, many fighting with great distinction overseas. Japanese American women, eager to prove their patriotism, volunteered for the WACs. But the army did everything it could to downplay their presence. When one of the first groups of Japanese WACs was sworn in at a ceremony in Denver, a reporter covering the event was forbidden to take a picture, and WAC officials later successfully lobbied to kill the story entirely.
“HITLER WAS THE ONE THAT GOT US OUT
OF THE WHITE FOLKS’ KITCHEN”
In San Francisco, when the call went out for women to fill in for the men who had gone to war, a young Maya Angelou decided that she wanted to be a streetcar conductor. “I’d pictured myself, dressed in a neat blue serge suit, my money changer swinging jauntily at my waist, and a cheery smile for the passengers which would make their own work day brighter,” she wrote later. Her mother warned her that although the city was advertising desperately for conductors “they don’t accept colored people on the streetcars.” Angelou stubbornly determined that she was going to get a job anyway, even though she was systematically ignored whenever she applied. “My trips to the streetcar office were of the frequency of a person on salary,” she said. “One day, which was tiresomely like all the others before it, I sat in the Railway office, ostensibly waiting to be interviewed. The receptionist called me to her desk and shuffled a bunch of papers to me. They were job application forms.” Thanks to Angelou’s persistence, and the city’s pressing need for workers, she did become a conductor—although one with some of the worst schedules of shifts in San Francisco. In New York, other black women with a similar stubborn patience finally broke the color barrier in 1944 and got jobs as telephone operators.
For black women, the war years were a combination of opportunity and frustration. The high-paying defense factories were the hardest to crack. In 1943, at the height of the labor shortage, the United Auto Workers surveyed 280 factories that employed women workers and found that only 74 were willing to hire an African American. When light industry went out recruiting, it turned to white women while heavy industry targeted black men. Most employers, when challenged by government or civil rights groups, claimed they could not hire black women because white women refused to work with them. That was often true, although companies that took a firm line and forced their employees to choose between integration and loss of their lucrative jobs generally managed to overcome the problem fairly quickly. White women seemed to have a different reaction to integration on the job than white men. Studies suggest that men were not threatened by the presence of African Americans in the factories, but they reacted angrily if black men were promoted to jobs with higher salaries or more authority. The white women, on the other hand, seemed intent on keeping a physical distance. They sometimes demanded separate bathrooms, claiming black women carried venereal disease.
The war was a complicated matter for black women. When hurtful things happened—like a South Carolina resolution announcing that Americans were overseas “fighting for white supremacy” or the Red Cross’s insistence that blood donations be segregated by race, or the Boston USO’s rule that black women could serve as hostesses only if they promised not to dance with white soldiers—they must have been tempted to wash their hands of the whole business. But they also understood that although there were plenty of things wrong with America, there were none that Hitler was going to fix. “Despite all the bad things that happened in the country, this was our home. This is where I was born. It was where my father and mother were. So there was a feeling of wanting to do your part,” said Gladys Carter, one of the first black WACs to serve overseas.
One way some black women made sense of all this was through a campaign called Double V, in which African Americans pledged to work for both victory overseas and social justice at home. Pauli Murray, a student at Howard University, recalled that when the male students joined the service, those who were left behind targeted a small segregated cafeteria in the heart of a black neighborhood “which had long been a source of mortification for unsuspecting Negroes.” While volunteers sat in at the tables, demonstrators carried signs reading “We Die Together, Why Can’t We Eat Together?” The owner was forced to close for the day, and eventually the restaurant was integrated. But the administration at Howard University, frightened by all the publicity, forced the students to cease and desist, and the restaurant quickly went back to its old ways. (A decade later, when black college students in the South began sitting in at lunch counters to force integration, Murray realized that she had been a woman ahead of her time.)
It was not until 1944, under heavy pressure from Eleanor Roosevelt, that black women were welcomed into the military. (Elsie Oliver, who unsuccessfully petitioned to be among the African American women assigned overseas, called the First Lady’s office and left a message registering her complaint. Mrs. Roosevelt was on the phone within the hour and Oliver was shipped out the same day.) The WAC eventually enlisted 4,000 black recruits. Despite its grave shortage of nurses, the army was reluctant to take black RNs—particularly if they would be treating white soldiers. The corps eventually took 500 and then enraged the black community by assigning some of them to work in prisoner-of-war camps.
The military’s policy—articulated as seldom as possible—was to give the black women separate but equal accommodations. Major Harriet West, the highest-ranking black in the WAC, felt that the African American women in the army could have borne the segregation better if people had not insisted on rubbing her soldiers’ faces in their status. When the first class of the WAC Officer Candidate School arrived at the reception center at Fort Des Moines, the women were waiting to be assigned quarters when a male officer walked in and ordered “all the colored girls” to move over to one isolated corner of the room. A black journalist traveling with Major West to Fort McClellan in Alabama reported that they were required to travel in “a dirty, segregated coach” where Major West was insulted by a white conductor “whom she had asked to hand her baggage from the train.” At Fort Devens, black women who had been trained as medical technicians were assigned to work as orderlies, scrubbing floors and windows. When they complained to the commander of the hospital, he said that they were there to do the dirty work. Nearly sixty black WACs refused to report to work in protest, and though most were persuaded to give up rather quickly, four continued their work stoppage and were court-martialed and sentenced to a year of hard labor. The resultant outcry forced the War Department to reverse the verdict, reinstate the WACs, and transfer them to a new post.
In civilian life, black women moved into whatever slots white women left. They often took over low-paying jobs like elevator operators and car cleaners on railroads, but whatever the job, they saw it as an improvement over domestic work. “My sister always said that Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen,” said Tina Hill, a Los Angeles aircraft plant worker. The white housewives who were left scrambling for domestic help blamed the government—particularly the Roosevelts—for encouraging the black women to look for higher-paying opportunities. Rumors were rife, particularly in the South, of secret “Eleanor Clubs” that encouraged former servants to flaunt their new equality by showing up at the grocery store when their ex-mistresses were doing their shopping.
“IT JUST ENDED OVERNIGHT”
“Ohh, the beautiful celebrations when the war ended,” said Peggy Terry, the defense plant worker from Paducah, Kentucky. “Everybody was downtown in the pouring rain and we were dancing. We took off our shoes and put ’em in our purse. We were so happy.”
When the war ended, the nation welcomed the men home and began enforcing the promise the women workers had made—or the country had decided they had made—to give up their jobs for the returning soldiers. “They always got priority and they would replace us, one by one,” recalled Rose Kaminski. “Finally the fellow that I replaced came, and I remember him coming back and I was laid off. It didn’t bother me…. I think we kind of looked forward to it.” But after a few years of “normal living” and the birth of another daughter, she called her old boss and took a “temporary” job at the factory. It wound up lasting thirty-one years.
Three million women left the workforce in 1946, and many of the younger ones were indeed eager to set up households and get on with the postwar baby boom. But most of the women who had worked during the war were older, with children who no longer needed them at home. They either needed to supplement their husbands’ pay or they were the sole support of their families. Surveys showed 70 percent of the female war workers wanted to stay at their jobs, but few were given the choice. “It just ended overnight,” said Marye Stumph, a single mother who had made three times her previous salary as an assembler at an aircraft factory. She was on weeklong vacation in New Mexico when the war ended, and by the time she returned to her home in California, a telegram was waiting “saying that the job was over. A ten-word telegram.” William Mulcahy, who supervised women at an electric parts assembly factory in Camden, remembered “the day after the war ended. We met the girls at the door, and they were lined up all the way down Market Street to the old movie theater about eight blocks away and we handed them a slip to go over to personnel and get their severance pay. We didn’t even allow them in the building, all these women with whom I had become so close, who had worked seven days a week for years and had been commended so many times by the navy for the work they were doing.”
It was inevitable that many of the women would lose their jobs—the defense industry was shutting down, and the employees that the heavily unionized factories were going to keep were the most senior, male workers. The enlisted men had been guaranteed their jobs back, and sentiment for hiring the men was so high that new male applicants were given jobs over women with seniority. The public relations machine that had gotten the women into the factory worked double-time getting them out. But as usual, the national theory about a woman’s place ignored the fact that many women didn’t have husbands to go out and work for them. “I happen to be a widow with a mother and son to support,” Ottilie Juliet Gattus wrote to President Truman after she was laid off from a job at Grumman Aircraft. “I am a lathe hand…classified as skilled labor, but simply because I happen to be a woman I am not wanted.”
If defense work did not lead to a career for most women, it was still a transforming experience for many. Peggy Terry, the Kentucky woman who worked in a shell factory, had so little knowledge of the world that she barely understood what being at war meant. Her horizons expanded when she wound up in Michigan, working at a plant with a large population of Polish workers. “They were the first people I’d ever known that were any different from me,” she told journalist Studs Terkel years later. “A whole new world just opened up…. I believe the war was the beginning of my seeing things.”
The country thought of itself as far more tolerant after the war, and in many ways it was. The dozens of movies about army squadrons made up of Italian, Irish, Jewish, and Anglo-Saxon soldiers reflected an image of America that society wanted to believe in. It was glorious, but of course only half a picture—blacks, Hispanics, and Asians were generally left out of the new egalitarian view of the American community. Minority women were doubly ignored, but they had been changed by the war, too, and to see the glass as empty would be to dismiss their accomplishments. “We got a chance to go places we had never been able to go before,” said Sarah Killingsworth, who had begun the war cleaning ladies’ rooms at an aircraft plant, then went on to open her own restaurant in Los Angeles. “For a person that grew up and knew nothing but hard times to get out on my own at eighteen years old and make a decent living and still make a decent person out of myself, I really am proud of me.”
Despite the universal desire to return to “normal,” things had changed. The old pattern, in which women worked until they married and then never again, was broken. And the women who went back to their homes, never to enter the job market again, were different, too. “They realized that they were capable of doing something more than cook a meal,” concluded Dellie Hahne, the music teacher, who remembered decades later when she went to Sunday dinner at an older woman’s home and listened while “she and her sister…were talking about the best way to keep their drill sharp in the factory. I had never heard anything like this in my life. It was just marvelous. I was tickled.”